The Man Who Expects No Heaven Plans Hell for Afterwards - Praise Be to Allah

To philosophize is to learn how to die. Whoever has learned that is free, because no one can threaten them anymore. You read that sentence and think of an 80-year-old man who, in the early hours of Saturday morning, published a message that represents the exact opposite of that idea. Donald Trump has not learned how to die. He has decided to weaponize death.

During the night he posted a text that breaks every rule of what a head of state can publicly say. It has to be taken apart word by word to understand how deep the decay runs, because not a single sentence in it is harmless.

It begins with a phrase taken from the language of weapons. Loaded and unlocked - that is what you call a rifle raised to the shoulder. Trump says it about 1,000 missiles and about a country of more than 90 million people. The vocabulary of a gun range laid over an entire nation. Then comes the escalation - thousands more would immediately follow. Even the grammar stumbles, and the numbers lose all meaning. After 1,000 come thousands, after thousands presumably even more. It is the counting of a man to whom quantity matters more than proportion.

The reason remains buried in fog. The threat, he says, had been made in many corners of the world. By whom, where, and when, he never says. A president announcing a campaign of annihilation bases it on whispers from everywhere. Then comes the legal caution of a man who otherwise despises caution - to murder him or attempt to murder him. Not merely a successful assassination, but even the attempt is enough to make an entire country pay. Anyone who takes that sentence seriously has not merely twisted the principle of proportionality - they have erased it.

At the center stands a single word, written in capital letters - I. The sitting President of the United States of America, in this case I. This is where the mask falls. The office and the man, which every president should have learned to separate, become one. It is not the institution that is under threat, but him, and for him the world is supposed to burn.

Then comes the coldest sentence in the entire text - the orders have already been given. A mechanism, then, that is triggered once its author is dead, a dead man's switch like those imagined by the nuclear powers during the Cold War, except this one is not designed for deterrence but for personal revenge beyond the grave. The military is ready, willing, and able - his words - a fixed phrase from legal English often found in contracts. The language of the real estate developer he once was, now applied to the destruction of an entire nation.

The tone continues in the same way - for a period of 1 year, extendable. A campaign of annihilation with a term like a commercial lease, complete with a renewal option. And finally the objective - to completely decimate and destroy all of Iran, every part of the country. To decimate originally meant killing every tenth man in a Roman legion. That is not enough for him. He places the word beside total destruction and means the entire country. It is the announcement of mass killing typed into a social media platform between advertisements and trivialities.

And beneath it the three words that have to be read twice before their absurdity fully registers - Praise be to Allah. A man who has spent months waging war against a country whose state religion he invokes here ends his threat of annihilation by praising the very God in whose name the other side claims to fire back. It is either naked mockery or the complete indifference of someone for whom words exist only for their effect, no longer for their meaning. Finally comes the signature as though beneath an official decree - President Donald J. Trump - as if a post already bearing his name still required the full presidential title so that everyone would understand this is not merely a man ranting, but a state speaking. That is what is so monstrous - both are true at the same time.

Behind it all lies a fear of death that this president has barely tried to hide during his second term. Troubled by persistent health complaints, severely swollen ankles, and conspicuous bruises on his hands, he has repeatedly wondered aloud whether he would make it into heaven, declaring that his chances of reaching heaven's gates were not good. A man who believes his own exclusion from paradise is likely has now aimed 1,000 missiles so that they will continue firing long after he himself is no longer alive to witness the flames. Whoever has no hope of heaven apparently plans hell for the time after himself.

The trigger is not pure imagination. According to several accounts that have not yet been independently verified, Israel provided Washington with intelligence suggesting an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Trump. Images from Tehran this week showed posters calling for his death. During the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Trump had ordered killed on the first day of the war, mourners carried banners declaring that Trump would be killed. The threat is therefore real. The question is not whether it exists, but what a head of state chooses to do with it. This one turns it into a posthumous bombing campaign and late-night boasting.

That fits another episode he would rather have kept quiet. On the return flight from the NATO summit in Turkey, he had to change aircraft and temporarily leave behind his gleaming new presidential jet, a gift from the government of Qatar. Officials said the return to the older aircraft, which Trump himself had previously mocked as unworthy of the office, was necessary for security reasons because Iran was allegedly planning an attack. Two former security officials reportedly said the gifted aircraft lacked the secure communications systems and military defensive capabilities required to operate safely during a conflict, a problem made even more serious after the renewed collapse of the ceasefire with Iran.

Trump himself wrote that his new aircraft had flown to an American base in the United Kingdom so that soldiers could inspect it. When asked during the closing press conference in Turkey whether the aircraft change had anything to do with security concerns, he answered that he was number one on Iran's death list. He did not say it like a man who was frightened. He said it like a man who was flattered. That is the real meaning of that night. The death list is not a source of fear for him, but a title. He wears the danger like a medal because it confirms what he needs most - his own importance. Montaigne understood that the powerful fear death most because they believe they have the most to lose, and that this fear makes them cruel. Whoever cannot accept the end tries to outdo it.

On that same Friday he confided his final instructions to the tabloid New York Post. He said he had left orders that if anything happened to him, they should literally bomb them at a level they had never seen before. That is what a last will sounds like in 2026. Not a word for his family, not a word of concern for his country, only the promise that his own death should drag an entire people into the abyss with him.

One should live in such a way that death can take no more than a quiet afternoon. That kind of serenity is as far beyond this man as his missiles are from peace. He has 1,000 reasons to feel immortal - and not a single one to actually be so.